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Sorry, this is a proud dad blog but… my son’s consultancy, ghSMART, recently received top rankings by Forbes (ratings by CEOs) and by Vault (ratings by employees). ghSMART & Company was ranked #1 in the 2020 Vault study of Best Consulting Firms to Work For in the categories of client interaction, level of challenge, and […]
Read MoreThe authors and trainers behind this myth have gotten the false notion that taking notes will mostly show candidates the top of your head, and you need almost constant eye contact to maintain rapport: “Notetaking looks bureaucratic. For all the candidate knows, you’re doodling.” Baloney! Well, okay, there is an exception – if it’s just […]
Read MoreDo you want to hire better? If you’re a CEO, a manager at any level, or a Human Resources professional, of course you do. This blog begins a series dispelling 10 myths about interviewing candidates for hire – “myths” because they are common recommendations for the “best” ways to interview… but from our experience, they […]
Read MoreEvery leader, including you, wants to have a team of high performers, A Players. When leaders hear about Topgraders achieving 85% high performers they want to know how many As, Bs, and Cs they have. Analyses of each of their people can become very complex and confusing. What were their accountabilities? To what extent did […]
Read MoreIf you could ask a candidate for hire only one question, for any job from entry clerk to CEO, what would be the most powerful, most revealing question? I should know — I’ve written 6 books on hiring, trained tens of thousands of managers in the most effective interviewing techniques, and I’ve conducted over 6,000 […]
Read MoreHow do I know what the most important skill for leaders to have is? I’ve assessed and coached 6,500 executives, from Vice President to CEOs, and from startups to Global 100 companies. I should know what the most important skills are and even what the most important skill for leaders is. To give you a […]
Read MoreThis blog presents the most common and most serious interviewer error and shows you how to avoid it so that you can get the deepest insights into candidates for hire. We at Topgrading know a lot about interviewing. I’ve written 5 hardbound books on the subject. We have learned the most probing, revealing interview techniques […]
Read MoreDo you know how much it costs you when you hire the wrong person? We have researched this topic for decades, and during all those years we’ve found that executives grossly underestimate the costs of bad hires… until we hand them the Topgrading Cost of Mis-Hire Form and they systematically estimate the costs. Our research […]
Read MoreHi, I’m Brad Smart, founder of Topgrading. This blog is mostly just to entertain you, but with one important lesson about interviewing. As a professional interviewer of candidates for top jobs, I have conducted thousands of five-hour interviews. And among those interviews, a few bizarre and even scary things happened. This blog tells you one […]
Read MoreWe have 300 pages of detailed case studies on our site, but we’ve had a lot of requests for brief summaries of just a few. This blog shows a couple dozen – just the name of the company, their Topgrading results, and a quote or two from the CEO saying Topgrading made the company more successful. To […]
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